The Demise of the Christian Writer and the Remaking of "Late Antiquity": From H.-I. Marrou's Saint Augustine (1938) to Peter Brown's Holy Man (1983)

For Jacques Fontaine

The Death and Works of Augustine

“We must at all costs avoid doing the feeling for Late Antique men,” Peter Brown has written. ¹ But our sympathy is never misspent.

There was nothing left of Augustine now but his library. Possidius compiled a full list of his works; he thought that no man could ever read them all. All future biographers of Augustine come to feel something of what Possidius felt in that empty room:

“Yet I think that those who gained most from him were those who had been able actually to see and hear him as he spoke in Church, and, most of all, those who had some contact with the quality of his life among men.” ²

Possidius said nothing about an empty room. Before we can begin to feel what he may have felt there, it must be imagined for us by the historian. For us? Only, on a literal reading, if we number ourselves among those “future” or now present “biographers of Augustine.” The empty room may be no bigger, nor any more crowded, than it seemed at first. Yet those who read to the end of Augustine of Hippo: A Biography are likely to feel, for their part, that the author of that book did not mean the terms of his title to be too exclusive. Peter Brown, writes a medieval historian, “came to Ancient History through an unusual entrance, a small one: the life and thought of one man,” but concedes: “The man was rather exceptional.” Augustine’s primary distinction, suggests Alexander Murray, was to have been “the most prolific of extant writers in Latin.” ³ And he quotes the lines that once ran beneath his portrait in the library of Isidore of Seville: “He lies who says he has read all your works”—the sentiment less pointedly expressed by Possidius, who could have found it already in Jerome’s eulogy of iron-bellied Origen. ⁴ The story Peter Brown would tell of “Late Antiquity,” Murray infers, was framed initially in the interstices of Augustine’s unencompassable literary legacy, as if in the room vacated by Possidius. Given the importance of this disciplinary concept in current Anglo-American historical scholarship, it is an inference we may like to test. ⁵

For all his reserves of fellow-feeling, the late twentieth-century author of Augustine of Hippo need have had little but texts in common with his early fifth-century counterpart. The subtitle was our guarantee of that. This new book would not be a saint’s life, not hagiography, in either the precritical sense of writing “inspired by religious devotion to the saints and intended to increase that devotion” (H. Delehaye) or the post-Bollandist, positivist one of sifting history from legend. Rather, it would be an instance of biography, a classical and modern genre of somewhat elastic boundaries. ⁶ For a writer who did not wish to be constrained by his subject, generic uncertainty conferred distinct advantages. Coming just four years after R. W. Southern’s Saint Anselm and His Biographer, itself the progenitor of several other “Oxford” books of saints, ⁷ the unsainted Augustine of Hippo simultaneously claimed the title of biography and, not incidentally, left the biographer’s role out of account. Like Possidius, Peter Brown would seek to convey “something of the course and quality of Augustine’s life.” His own character, as he first describes it, is that of “a historian of the declining Roman Empire.” ⁸ The balance between biography and history is carefully struck, and tilted towards the latter.

In 1968, eight years before the series that would become The Making of Late Antiquity, the Carl Newell Jackson Classical Lectures at Harvard were delivered by Arnaldo Momigliano, of all classicists the one who has most directly influenced Peter Brown’s work. His theme was The Development of Greek Biography. ⁹ “When I was young,” Momigliano recalled, “scholars wrote history and gentlemen wrote biography. But [End Page 379...